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Monthly Archives: November 2010

PXE boot is not available in Hyper-V 2008 R2 when using a Synthetic Network Adapter. In order to PXE boot a virtual machine (VM), you need to turn off the VM and add a Legacy Network Adapter. If the VM is an existing machine with a bootable hard disk, you’ll also need to change the boot order, so PXE Boot is above IDE Hard Drive.

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If you’re using a version of Windows since Vista need HyperTerminal you’ll find it’s no longer part of Windows. If you only need remote shell access, you can use the Windows Remote Shell (WinRS). If you need to troubleshoot modems go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Phone and Modem Options. However, if you need to connect to serial devices as you did with HyperTerminal you’ll need to download an alternative, my favourite is Putty http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

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You cannot protect the Microsoft Exchange Database Availability Group (DAG) on a secondary DPM 2010 server.

You are prompted to restart a client computer after you install an agent on the client.

DPM services crash, and you receive the error, “Unable to connect to the database because of a fatal database error.”

MSDPM crashes, and event ID 945 is logged in the event log.

When you change a Protection Group, add a very large database, change the disk allocation, and then commit the Protection Group, DPM 2010 does not honor the user intent, and instead, DPM 2010 sets the sizes of replica and shadow copy volumes to the default sizes.

The Management tab does not link to information about the latest Microsoft Knowledge Base article for DPM 2010.

You receive the message, “Computers not synchronized,” when you try to replicate DPM 2010 databases to a System Center Operations Manager.

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Dynamically expanding disks enable you to thin provision virtual machines (VMs) storage. This means you can pack more VMs onto a given amount of disk, but you need to ensure that if you provision more storage than is physically available, you don’t run out of space on the host. The PowerShell script below produces a csv file showing the space available for growth on each VM with a dynamically expanding disk. You can use this script to see how much space could still be used by your VMs and therefore see if you’re likely to run out of space on the host. It’ll also show you if a dynamic disk is about to reach it’s maximum size.

Load PowerShell from the icon in the SCVMM console

Next copy and paste the code below into the PowerShell console, replacing VMMHOST with the name of your SCVMM host and the path of the csv file as appropriate.